Last night, Jagger had sent him out on Justice’s job, and he’d died.
“He has to learn sometime,” Jagger had said.
I kicked a wooden chair. It skidded across the room and hit the wall. It wasn’t enough. I was angry. I’d never been so angry in my life. It was a burning, poisonous fire raging through my veins.
He’d killed him.
He knew Griff wasn’t Justice. He knew he was gentle and timid and innocent. He’d sent Griff against five Clark conjurers, and . . .
I kicked the chair again. The wood splintered. Then I turned and punched the wooden table.
The pain lanced through my knuckles, and I swore.
The whole while I raged, Griff lay unmoving. He was coming back into his body. I didn’t know how long he’d been lying there or what had happened to kill him. He might be like this for hours more.
I swore, hitting the table again.
I looked down. My knuckles were raw and already bruising. The skin was torn, and blood smeared my pale skin.
“Griff,” I whispered, my throat tight, my eyes burning.
A dark rose tattoo bloomed on his wrist, with a drop of blood falling from a single thorn. He had one life left. One. Then he’d be a mine.
I clenched my hands, my knuckles stinging. The rage consumed me. It swept through my bones and settled in my chest with the drumming chant: Kill them, kill them, kill them all.
I swung around, my fists ready to punch, as Last entered the kitchen.
She smirked at my bloody knuckles and the splintered chair. “You can’t wake him either?”
I heaved in a breath, trying to push aside the red veil covering my vision.
Griff was good.
Griff was innocent.
And within days, he’d been killed—first by Finn (or an illusion of Finn), and second by the Clarks.
“Why are you here?” I asked Last again.
My voice was a dark, dangerous thing. It was the threat of a creature who’d never seen the light and stalked its prey in darkness.
Last tilted her head, listening to the undercurrents riding on the timbre of my words.
“You sound like Primus.” If she was surprised, I couldn’t tell. She turned from my fisted, bloodied hands to the wrecked chair. “Is that why he stares at you when he thinks no one’s watching? Does he see himself in you, Mari? Hmm? He kills so many things. After a while, there won’t be anything left to kill except himself. But if you’re just like him . . .”
She stared at me, a girl watching the cricket in her cage. Just like that, the rage that had so violently swept through me extinguished. My shoulders sagged, and I turned toward Griff, noting the changes in him.
When he came back, he always looked the same. The only difference was that he always came back healthy, new, and unbroken. It were as if the used penny had been traded in at the bank for the brand-new mint. All the scuffs, scratches, and oxidation were wiped away, and Griff was shiny and sparkling again.
This time, there wasn’t much difference. He hadn’t been alive for long enough to get scuffed. But his shaggy brown hair was shiny and soft. His skin was unblemished. When he was awake, he looked as innocent as a newborn pup. It was his eyes. They were large, brown, and limpid. Trusting. Maybe it was also his expression. Even in Hell Gate, he managed to look at the world as if people, in truth, were good. As if all of us were good.
But with his eyes closed and his face wiped free of any expression, I was able to see what he’d look like without his innocence and his inner light.
His face was narrow, his cheeks hollow, his nose long. He had thick, dark eyebrows and a cleft in his chin. He was skinny, but with the ropy, corded muscles of an animal that ran miles chasing down its prey. The hair on his body was sandy brown, and he had more stubble on his face than I’d ever noticed. I’d always felt Griff looked younger than me even though he was older. But I had to acknowledge it wasn’t his outside appearance that made it seem that way. It was what was inside him.
If he lost that innocence, he would look . . . a bit frightening, to be honest. He would look just like his father—a merciless, violent beast-man who had terrorized the eastern seaboard for centuries.
I saw with some surprise that Griff, even in human form, looked just like his father. The only difference was what was inside. I was suddenly terrified that after last night, it was gone.
